An electronic book (“e-book”) is a publication in digital form consisting of text, images, or both, and readable on one or more computing devices. E-books may be read on dedicated hardware computing devices known as e-book reader devices, as well as on personal computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, wireless phones and other display-based electronic devices.
E-books may be published in different formats, including plain text, portable document format (PDF), hypertext markup language (HTML), mobipocket, eReader, postscript, and the like. In some cases, a digital rights management (DRM) encoding may be used in conjunction with a particular e-book format to prevent unauthorized usage or distribution of protected content. For example, a particular publisher may use a proprietary DRM encoding in conjunction with a publishing format to create a proprietary e-book format.
People often like to share information with other people. For example, people often share information that they have read with family, friends, colleagues, or other people through verbal and/or written communication. Sometimes, people like to quote things they read, such as a sentence, several lines, or even a few paragraphs in a document.